by Mike Dorning
HARRISBURG, Pa. -- As Barack Obama caravans through the hardscrabble towns of rural Pennsylvania, he is making clear the politics of hope has an enemies list.
Oil companies, predatory lenders, highly paid corporate CEOs and health insurance companies all rank high on it
In between drop-ins at bowling alleys, sports bars and other blue-collar hangouts, Obama is stoking an us-against-them populism that makes common purpose with the grievances of working-class families feeling pinched by the hard economic times.
Despite his lead in national polls, Obama is engaged in a fierce struggle with rival Hillary Clinton heading into Pennsylvania's April 22 primary, the next contest in the battle for the Democratic presidential nomination. And the white working-class voters he has had difficultly attracting in recent contests will be crucial to the outcome here.
With his sunny persona and more measured style, Obama does not match the hard-core populism that drove former Sen. John Edwards' failed presidential campaign. But the Illinois senator, who also won the endorsement Monday of Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.), is showing plenty of outrage these days.
Among the first television ads he aired to introduce himself to Pennsylvania voters was a commercial excoriating Exxon Mobil for its $40 billion profit last year and blaming big oil companies that "block change" for rising gas prices. A President Obama, he vows, would make them "pay a penalty" with a windfall profits tax.
At a town hall meeting in Lancaster, Pa., on Monday, his target was $19 million in bonuses awarded to the two top executives of sub-prime mortgage lender Countrywide Financial.
"These are the folks who are responsible for infecting the economy and creating, helping create a home foreclosure crisis—2 million people may end up losing their homes," Obama fumed, pacing back and forth in front of a wooden lectern.
"Now what's wrong with this picture?" Obama continued, drawing shouts from the crowd. "Everything's wrong with it. But the problem is we've almost come to expect it…because nobody in Washington seems to be outraged about it."
In Pittsburgh, at a rally Friday that marked the beginning of a six-day bus tour through the state, a world view suspicious of corporate power even shaped Obama's retelling of his biography.
He usually casts his early experience as a community organizer in uplifting terms that focus on the choice he made to pursue public service and lessons he learned about the power of ordinary people to create change. But in Pittsburgh, he put a darker spin on the period, portraying it as a struggle to right damage done by unseen "big corporations."
"A lot of the economic decisions weren't being made in the community," Obama said, describing the shutdown of steel mills on Chicago's South Side during the 1980s. "They were being made in New York and Dallas. They were a bunch of people shuffling paper and deciding to, you know, wreck entire communities without knowing sort of what it meant to those people."
The approach represents a shift for a candidate whose persona has been so tied to hopes he can transcend racial and political divisions and unify the country.
But Obama's chief strategist, David Axelrod, said that it is not a thematic break for a campaign that has long stressed the corrosive influence of Washington lobbyists. And he noted confrontational speeches Obama gave to Detroit automakers last May challenging them on the environment and to the Wall Street financial community in September challenging them on an economy that serves the middle class.
"These are not new themes, but we're certainly punching them hard here because they're central to the concerns of people," Axelrod said.
Obama ally Sen. Bob Casey Jr. (D-Pa.), a social conservative with a large following among blue-collar voters in the state, appears to be a believer in the approach, enthusiastically presenting Obama as engaged in a struggle against power.
Casey regularly invokes the political forces arrayed against Obama in the state, suggesting a parallel between Obama's campaign challenges and the economic forces stacked against Pennsylvania's working families.
The Democratic political establishment, including Gov. Ed. Rendell and the mayors of Philadelphia and Pittsburgh, has sided with rival Clinton, who leads in recent polls of the state.
"I know something about our state," Casey told a crowd in Harrisburg, Pa, in a typical introduction, "Our state loves an underdog and a fighter, and we have one in Barack Obama."
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Comments
NBC- Aswini Anburajan
GREENBURG, Pa
OBAMA LIES IN PENNSYLVANIA AD
It's unfortunate that Senator Obama is using false advertising to explain why he can be trusted to do something about energy prices. In his ad, Obama says, I'm Barack Obama, and I don't take money from oil companies or lobbyists, and I won't let them block change any more. Obama has been the recipient of more than $220,000 from the oil and gas industry just since as of Feb/08. Two of Obama's campaign bundlers are also CEOs for oil and gas companies, per his campaign Web site? Obama needs to answer to VOTERS about his dealings with one of his largest contributors Exelon, a big nuclear power company that he cut deals behind closed doors protecting them from full disclosure in the nuclear industry. Exxon, Shell, and others are among his biggest donors
Judicial Watch:
By Klaus Marre
Obama ‘intended to leave no paper trail’ OBAMA REFUSES to cooperate in releasing 8 years of his state senate records. One main reason REZKO!
The WashigntonPost Fact Checker
ABCNEWS.COM
Senator Obama CAUGHT LYING about Kennedy Role in Helping His Father
Contrary to Obama's claims in speeches Kennedy family did not provide the funding for a September 1959 airlift of 81 Kenyan students to the United States that included Obama's father. According to historical records and interviews with participants, the Kennedys were approached for support for the program a year later, July 1960. family responded with a $100,000 donation, which went to pay for a second airlift in September 1960.
According to Citizen Wells - March 21, 2008: Obama has a dual citizenship with Kenya. His passport was breached today by inquiring minds because Obama is an anti-Israel, pro-pan-Arabian Islamic-socialist who has ties to Marxist Libyan President Muamar al Gadaffi, and a Syrian tycoon, Antoin Rezko, Saudi Arabian Scheiks and Rezko's "close friend" Nadhami Auchi, the one who gave Obama fundraiser money (and helped to buy his mansion): Iraqi billionaire, global arms dealer, Nadhmi Auchi, was Baathist best friends with Saddam Hussein, and the main financial backer (from funds stolen from Oil for Food Program0 for Saddam's - Iraqi -Saudi oil pipeline, and who stood trial with Saddam Hussein in 1959 for conspiring to assassinate Iraqi President Qasim.
Also marxist Nicaragian President Daniel Ortega is on the front line supporting Obama for the revolution of changes and then there is hard core anti-Israel, pro-Palestine PLO Enforcer Rashid Khalid, (Obama was on Kalidi's Woods Fund. Obama was a memb er of the Woods Fund with communist domestic terrorist Bill Ayers of the Weather Underground who bombed the Pentagon, the U.S. Capitol among other things and their organization raised money for anti-Israel programs, and also AAAN, for Arabs and then there is especially Kenya - where in August 2007, Obama went to Kenya to support his E. Germany communist educated cousin Raila Odinga for Kenyan Presidential election, who claims coincidentally to also be a Christian who signed NAMLEF and other pacts wutg radical muslims who set churches filled with Christians on fire, and macheted them in the streets, causing a political and religious mini-civil war over the MUO.
all of Obama's mentors, buddies, political affiliations, organizational memberships and all of his hard core militant muslim family members, like his brother Abongo (Roy" Odinga who hates America, and their communist grandfather who ran with Russia and hated America, not to mention his socialist connection to his profound childhood mentor, Frank Marshall Davis, a member of the Communist Party, CPUSA, and Obama's endorsement by the Black Panthers. Obama titled his book "Audacity of Hope," after Pastor Wright's sermon about the need to destroy capitalism and the middle-class at the hands of the rich white people and the west. Article by Citizen Wells 3/21/08
Posted by: Jose | April 1, 2008 7:09 AM
"The Democratic political establishment,..."
That's really it, isn't it? The old line Dems want their turn at the trough. The Republics have had 8 years, and now it's their turn. The old guard had already selected Clinton as the Dem. candidate, and somehow this guy blew away the inevitability argument.
I would still rather have Edwards as the nominee, but I'll happily settle for Obama if he is willing to put an end to this corporate kleptocracy.
Posted by: weinerdog43 | April 1, 2008 7:41 AM
Senator Clinton is running out of cards to play. She has run a good campaign and made strong arguments on serious issues that have surely contributed to the national debate. But it's becoming increasingly clear that this contest is over. If she's committed to returning Democrats to the White House, she can make her biggest contribution now by dropping out of the race.
Visit http://www.dropouthillary.org and sign a petition urging Hillary Clinton to withdraw now.
Forward this link on. Encourage everyone you know to visit and sign the petition.
Posted by: Drop Out Hillary! | April 1, 2008 8:37 AM
The problem is that Obama is the product of the corrupt Illinois politicians and is as much a part of the old guard as anyone else - he just wears a different coat and talks a little fancier. JAFPo!
Posted by: Paul | April 1, 2008 8:42 AM
There's a story in politico.com yesterday that the Swamp, which usually repeats what politico writes, has ignored: that Obama has been caught in another lie:
"During his first run for elected office, Barack Obama played a greater role than his aides now acknowledge in crafting liberal stands on gun control, the death penalty and abortion -- positions that appear at odds with the more moderate image he has projected during his presidential campaign.
The evidence comes from an amended version of an Illinois voter group's detailed questionnaire, filed under his name during his 1996 bid for a state Senate seat.
Late last year, in response to a Politico story about Obama's answers to the original questionnaire, his aides said he "never saw or approved" the questionnaire.
They asserted the responses were filled out by a campaign aide who "unintentionally mischaracterize[d] his position."
But a Politico examination determined that Obama was actually interviewed about the issues on the questionnaire by the liberal Chicago nonprofit group that issued it. And it found that Obama -- the day after sitting for the interview -- filed an amended version of the questionnaire, which appears to contain Obama's own handwritten notes added to one answer."
Obama has since acknowledged that this is his handwriting.
Seems to me the same Swamp that highlights Hillary's lies about her Bosnian snipers, can highlight Obama's lies as well.
Posted by: Alice Palmer | April 1, 2008 9:12 AM
Alice Palmer Amen to your post! Jerry White, Springfield, IL
Posted by: Jerry White | April 1, 2008 11:40 AM
I think this is a fight that needs to go on. I am a firm beliver that Obama gets a free ride in the press and that all of the information is not known about him. I for one will vote McCain if he (Obama) is picked as the Dem of choice because of a lack of trust in him. I personally went out to check out voting histories and where he stands on his politics and yes, I find that he talks out of both sides of his mouth. He is just another person who will tell you what you want to hear but will not deliver in the end. PEOPLE DO YOUR RESEARCH, IT IS OUT THERE. Don't be fooled by the speaches, be enlightened by the RECORD.
Posted by: rochelle | April 1, 2008 12:41 PM